The Hunger

by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

  “Wear it around your neck and out of sight,” she said.

  Marta was cleanly dressed and presentable by the time the husband came home from his stall in the market.

  “So this is your ‘niece,’” he said, amused eyes looking at Marta. “I don’t notice much family resemblance, but we can use an extra pair of hands.”

  Idris also realized that Marta was not Adila’s niece. She let her know, with a hard look in her eyes, that if Marta were any trouble at all she would be reported in an instant. Marta was expected to do the bulk of household chores, and the numbing routine was repeated without end.

  She was the first one up each day. Before the sun rose, Marta would knead the dough for the daily bread, then set it aside in a covered bowl in a warm place outside. Then she would sweep out the hearth, saving any live cinders to light the outdoor oven, and then sweep out the rest of the little hut. She would prepare the Turkish coffee just as the others would begin to waken. The husband would lay down his prayer mat facing Mecca, and say his morning prayers. Then Idris would bustle in to pour him his coffee and glare at Marta to get moving on the bread. It was always a rush to get the first batch of bread ready before the husband asked for it.

  There was a small wooden table with a smooth flat surface that Marta used for shaping the bread. Quickly, she would take a handful of the dough and pound it into a smooth round circle. The oven, which had been heating since dawn, would be opened, and she would put in the first piece of dough on a metal sheet with a long handle. Within minutes, the first pita would be ready. Idris, all smiles, would present it to the husband for his breakfast.

  The rest of the bread was made more methodically. Marta would shape the dough into flat circles, tossing them on top of one another into a waiting bowl. Then she would take the uncooked pita loaves out to the small stone oven and stand there, baking each one until they were all done. The husband would be long gone by this time, and so Marta would serve Idris and Adila their breakfast. Only after they had eaten would Marta break her fast for the day. Marta gobbled down not only her own breakfast, but any crumbs and scraps that had been discarded by the husband and his wives. She was desperate to nourish her body now that she was again surrounded by food.

  Marta scrubbed the laundry by hand outside, then hung it up to dry. She chopped vegetables, and aired the bedding. And then the day’s chores really began.

  The husband sold a variety of goods at his stall in the market, but one of the most popular items was a certain wicker basket that Adila had devised years ago. The baskets had delicate geometric patterns in different colours of wicker on the outside and were prized for their beauty. But their real value lay in the fact that they were waterproof. Adila weaved them so tightly that once they were filled with water, the wicker reeds would expand slightly and block out all the holes. Women in the area loved these baskets because they were so light to carry to the well. Before Marta’s arrival, Adila would make the baskets all afternoon, and Idris would sort out the wicker and decorate the outsides of the baskets. But after Marta came to live there, Idris would go up onto the roof and sulk or she would go the mosque or the baths. Marta assisted Adila in her place. The husband would come home and beat her, yelling “You lazy Armenian. An extra pair of hands, yet no more baskets.” Idris would watch, a look of satisfaction on her face. Adila was afraid to say anything for fear that Marta would be turned out of the house.

  Her only respite was donning a black chador and accompanying Adila to the market. The fine mesh that covered her face provided Marta with welcome anonymity. She walked freely beside Adila through the streets of Aintab. Moslem women had several advantages in the black robe and veil. A Moslem woman was a nonentity. Adila told her stories of women who travelled to their lovers unseen, and others who had carried secret messages and helped to overthrow the old government. It was because of the black robe and veil that Adila was able to say her prayers at the abandoned Armenian church each day. And it was because of the black robe that she had been able to save Marta.

  But the black robe that provided so much safety was also a symbol of all that was wrong with a woman’s place in this veiled world. It didn’t take long for Marta to realize exactly what was expected of her as part of the “husband’s” household. Now that she had entered his harem, it was the husband’s right to ask anything of her. Marta’s refusal would lead to another deportation—and she knew she wouldn’t survive a second one.

  Home

  As the days blended into weeks, Marta’s cheeks became less hollow and her figure began to fill out. Marta was not the only one to notice the change. There were angry whispered words between Idris and Adila, and Marta could hear her name mentioned in the fury. And it didn’t help matters that the husband no longer complained of her presence.

  The tension in the hut reached a peak by autumn. Idris was past jealousy. Now she was angered by her husband’s continued interest in Marta. Adila too felt ignored. “I should never have brought you here.”

  Neither she nor Adila had any surviving children, and if Marta ever had a child, then she would automatically become first wife. This was something neither wife would risk.

  Ironically, it was Idris who solved the problem.

  “My youngest sister is about to have her first baby,” Idris mentioned to Adila one day. “I am going to Marash to be with her, and I will not leave that girl in this house while I’m gone.”

  “Then you’re taking her with you?” asked Adila.

  Idris was so relieved to be finally rid of Marta that she had the driver take her to the orphanage gates first, before she went on to her sister’s house. Marta could only imagine the beating she got when she returned home.

  As soon as Marta was inside the orphanage complex she tore off the hood of her chador and breathed in freedom. This was the safest home she had ever known and it felt wonderful to be back, but she noticed that it was uncommonly quiet. She looked around, expecting to see children playing games in the courtyard, or missionaries walking briskly from one building to another. But the place was empty.

  She walked up to the building that had been Miss Younger’s office and knocked on the door. It took Marta a moment to realize that the woman who answered the door was Miss Younger. Gone was the neat bun of blonde hair, and in its place was dishevelled grey. Worry lined the woman’s face, aging her by decades.

  It took Miss Younger the same moment to realize exactly who it was standing at her doorstep. Marta had left the orphanage just a few short months ago, rosy-cheeked and dressed like a boy. Now she looked like a careworn Turkish housewife. But the eyes belonged to Marta.

  Miss Younger wrapped her arms around her former charge and hugged with surprising strength. “It’s so good to see you,” she cried.

  Miss Younger knew better than to ask after the others who had been deported with Marta. The question would have been as painful as the answers. Instead, she thanked God for the one who came back. She ushered Marta into her office and made her sit down in the guest chair.

  “Would you like to stay here?” asked Miss Younger.

  “Yes.”

  “Our orphans are gone,” said Miss Younger in a voice tinged with sadness. “Many were deported, and many were taken from here and put in Turkish orphanages. Soon, they won’t even know that they were born Armenian.”

  Marta bent her head in sadness. “At least some will live.”

  The two women got up and walked through the empty streets of the orphanage complex. Marta could imagine flickers of images of orphans who had been and who would be again. They passed the courtyard where Marta had last seen her sister, and they passed the spot where Paris had died. On one side of the courtyard was the boys’ orphanage where Kevork had lived, and on the other was where Marta and her sister Mariam had lived with all the other girls. Miss Younger and Marta walked side by side until they reached the building where all of the missionaries had been housed. “You may stay here with me,” said Miss Younger. “You’re no longer a child.”


  She led Marta to a small bedroom beside her own which had belonged to Aunt Anna. “Stay as long as you wish,” she said. And then she went to her own room and fetched a long black western-style skirt and a white shirtwaist blouse. She laid the new clothing on the bed.

  Marta looked down at the bed and the western-style clothing. Her own Turkish outfit was much more comfortable, although it would be a treat to sleep in a bed instead of on a mud floor. But this room was not right.

  “I’d like to go back to my old bed,” Marta said, picking up the shirtwaist and skirt and hugging them to her chest.

  “But you’ll be alone,” said Miss Younger.

  “I know.”

  She and Miss Younger shared a simple meal of olives and cheese and a few dried biscuits in an empty dining hall. As Marta looked down the long tables, she imagined the ghosts of so many orphans, sitting alongside of her. She imagined Kevork sitting there too, and her sister Mariam. Even the ghost of Aunt Anna was there, walking between the tables, making sure that everyone had enough to eat.

  After dinner, Marta walked in the moonlight back to her old room. She was still wearing her Turkish house clothes, although the chador had been abandoned. She set the shirtwaist and skirt on her bed. Perhaps tomorrow, she would put them on. She looked down the row of empty beds—all bare to the mattress—and walked over to the one where her sister had slept. Crouching in front of it, she lay her head down on the mattress and breathed in the faint scent of her sister. “Please be safe,” she prayed.

  Her own bed was also bereft of bedding and she was too tired to go back out and walk to the laundry at the other end of the complex for linens. Perhaps later, she said to herself, and then lay down on the bare mattress, dressed in her Turkish clothes, but with the skirt and blouse wrapped around her for warmth. Around her neck she still wore the pierced coin on a leather strap. As she settled into her nest of clothing, her hand wrapped around the coin, holding it to her heart.

  As she drifted off to sleep, she could feel her consciousness rise, hovering somewhere just above her. She looked down at the sleeping figure below and sighed. She had come so far.

  Then as she watched, the clothing that she wore and the clothing that covered her disintegrated and disappeared. The bed disappeared too, and then the room. She blinked and looked down again, and realized that she was now lying naked on that same sandy shore where her journey had begun.

  She saw herself waken and stretch, then rise. She watched as Marta walked towards the glistening blue water. She stepped in, the cold wetness enveloping her feet with a shock. She looked down and marvelled at the seductive sensation of waterborne sand swirling around her toes and tickling at her ankles. But then the swirling turned into a tugging, and she felt herself being pulled down in an undertow. She was about to cry out when her head dipped below the surface.

  In an attempt to free herself from the relentless pulling, she flailed her arms and legs. I want to live! She tried to cry out the words, but her mouth filled with brine.

  Above her the water was no longer blue, but black, and the sand below her had given way to a tunnel. The inexorable pulling continued, and Marta tried to hold her breath, but then finally gave up and breathed in a huge gulp of salt water. With a shock, she realized that she could breathe the salt water as if it were air.

  Just as she was becoming accustomed to the whooshing ride through the salty tunnel, it came to an end. Marta’s feet touched solid ground and all the water swirling around her drained away. Marta found herself standing naked, save for the gold coin around her neck.

  She heard a rustling sound behind her and turned. There stood an emaciated woman wrapped in a stiff white sheet. Marta’s throat filled with tears when she regarded the woman’s hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. This woman had suffered through famine and ravages too. Marta reached out to touch the woman’s hand—to give comfort. Then she noticed the scars on the knuckles and the needle marks on her arms. With a start, she understood that this was Paula. Marta’s heart was filled with sorrow.

  “I want to live!” Paula cried.

  Marta opened her arms to comfort the frail woman, and as she did so, she felt a strange tingling throughout her limbs and a prickly cold feeling at the back of her scalp. Paula opened her arms as if to return Marta’s embrace, and Marta felt a loving warmth envelop her.

  And then Marta no longer existed. She had just stepped inside of Paula.

  Paula

  An incredible fatigue enveloped Paula, and as much as she wanted to stay awake—to try and figure out what was happening to her—Paula realized that it was impossible for her to keep her eyes open. Her knees buckled beneath her and she collapsed into a dreamless sleep.

  When she awoke, she found herself again lying in an unfamiliar bed. Her hand was still clutched around what she thought was the pierced coin, but when she looked down at it, she realized that it was a round adhesive disk stuck to her chest. What she thought was the leather strap was actually a wire, connecting the disk on her chest to a monitor at the side of her bed. She looked down at her body and recognized the blue material. Her sensibilities were rapidly returning to her, and she realized that she was dressed in a blue hospital robe, a starched white sheet stretched taut across her bony hips.

  She lifted a hand to her face. It was not the tanned, capable hand that had been Marta’s. It was the bony, damaged hand of Paula. There was a piece of white tape stuck onto the back of it, just above the angry scarred knuckle. It held in place a needle with clear plastic tubing from which a faintly yellow liquid coursed.

  Paula recognized that liquid, and restrained her other hand from pulling the tubing out. Where once she would have considered the life-sustaining fluid an intrusion, now she struggled to be thankful for it. Her eyes followed the path of the plastic tubing and she saw that it was hooked up to a beeping book-sized monitor. She also noticed wires that were coming out of a video screen. With her unencumbered hand, she followed the path of the wires underneath the neck of her hospital gown to their end on her chest. There were a half a dozen or so of the wires attached to her skin with those round adhesive disks. They were monitoring her heart, Paula realized, as she watched the blips on the video screen with her hand placed over her heart.

  The bed in which she lay was narrow and not well padded—it was little more than a stretcher. The jail-like sides were pulled up and Paula swallowed back her anxiety as she tried to convince herself that she had been put in this room for her own good. Her eyes darted nervously around, taking in the pseudo-cheery flowered wallpaper border, the yellow painted walls, and the soothing hums from all the monitors. She was the only person in the room, and it was quite small. She stared at the door, willing someone to come in, and finally, her wish came true. A woman in a pastel peach pantsuit with a stethoscope around her neck tapped gendy on the door, and then entered, not waiting for permission.

  The woman scanned the monitors and then she looked directly into Paula’s eyes. “We thought we were going to lose you,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “Cardiac arrest.”

  Paula did not reply. What could she say? She knew she’d been given another chance.

  Paula drifted into a long healing sleep and when she awoke she realized that she was no longer alone. Her mother, father, and brother were hovering over her, watching her every breath. Paula’s heart leapt for joy at the sight of her family. When she had lived as Marta, the absence of the family had left her shrouded in an indefinable sadness. For all their faults, and in spite of all the angry words that had passed between them, Paula knew how fortunate she was to be part of a family. Her eyes locked on her brother Erik’s. “I am so sorry,” she said.

  He looked at her with confusion. “Sorry for what?”

  “Sorry for being such a rotten sister.”

  Erik’s eyes teared up, and he angrily swiped at them with the back of his knuckle. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Paula noticed that her mother, who was usually immacula
tely groomed, was wearing a wrinkled blouse and her hair was down. “We’re so happy to have you back,” she cried.

  Paula’s father said nothing. He simply held her unencumbered hand and squeezed it far too hard.

  The nurse shooed them away after a few minutes. “Paula needs her rest,” she said. Moments later, the same nurse brought in a tray and set it on Paula’s lap.

  Paula stared down at the selection on her tray and was surprised to have the same reaction as before. Eating was the enemy. She lifted her teaspoon and dipped it into the applesauce, coating the bowl of the spoon with a thin glaze. This she brought to her mouth and licked. As the minuscule portion of sustenance stuck at the back of her throat, Paula stifled an urge to gag. This is medicine, medicine, medicine, she chanted. Then she stared at a blob of glistening red Jell-O, shivering in the middle of a chipped bowl. Through sheer force of will, Paula stuck her spoon into that and broke off a small spoonful. She placed it between her lips like a sacrament. This is medicine, medicine, medicine, she chanted. The gelatin dissolved with her saliva and she swallowed it down. She lay her head back against her pillow and closed her eyes in exhaustion. She could eat no more.

  When she opened her eyes, Gramma Pauline was standing at the side of the bed, looking fragile with anxiety. She was not wearing her volunteer smock. Instead, she had one of her myriad of colourful silk tunics and flowing palazzo pants. With a shock, Paula recognized this outfit for what it was. It was almost identical to the Turkish house outfit she had worn in her days at the harem.

  Gramma Pauline’s white hair rippled free down her back and her jewelled fingers with their beautifully almond-shaped nails were intertwined with Paula’s weak ones. Paula lifted her grandmother’s hands up to her lips and kissed them, breathing in the heady aroma of turpentine and Dove soap.

  Such close sight of the hands gave Paula another jolt. They were more than familiar. She looked up into her grandmother’s face and was startled by a new sense of recognition. “Mariam?” she asked.